Before
Not a clean operator-to-investor story. He interned at a startup, spent about three and a half years at In-Q-Tel evaluating deals, took a Stanford MBA, then did business development at Google and held roles at IronPort, Gaia and Serious Business, which Zynga acquired.
The move
The genuinely repeatable move is the overlap. He ran his own mobile gaming startup, Bionic Panda Games, as chief executive for about three years while simultaneously working part time as a venture partner at SoftTech VC. He proved investing judgment on someone else's platform without quitting his day job, so there was performance to point at rather than potential to argue about.
The turn
The part-time seat converted to full time at SoftTech, later Uncork Capital, where he stayed eight years. He left in 2015 to found Precursor Ventures specifically to serve founders more than one degree removed from easy access to venture capital, which is to say founders like the earlier version of himself.
Timeline
- In-Q-Tel, roughly 3.5 years evaluating deals
- Stanford MBA, then Google, IronPort, Gaia and Serious Business
- Roughly 3 years as a startup chief executive while a part-time venture partner at SoftTech
- Full time at SoftTech, later Uncork Capital, for 8 years
- 2015 founds Precursor Ventures
What this route asks
Time. Roughly fifteen years passed between his first startup exposure and founding his own firm. His own advice is to make a five or ten year plan and to become genuinely expert in something specific rather than expecting a single exit to do it. Most retellings compress this into operator turned investor, which loses both the mechanism and the timeline.